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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

Wow, Gamasutra really has no understanding of Free and Open Source Software concepts. That is really not a good place to announce this kind of things. When you read "going completely open source" and see what it actually means, there's only one appropriate reaction: faceplam.

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I have tried and tried to get people to acknowledge that "Free Software" and "Open Source" are very different things from "free software" and "open source". Those capitals make all the difference, and I really wish the FSF and OSI would use less ambiguous words.

Tell any lay person on the street that MAME wasn't free software, and they'd ask you how much it cost. Tell them it wasn't open source, and they'd assume it meant the source wasn't available (if they even knew what source code was.)

But it just devolves into endless arguing over semantics. The ideology gets to be so strong that it's almost like religious dogma. And that's really not helping anyone.

Simply stating that MAME was non-commercial would be understood by everyone, and from there you'd be in a perfect position to then explain to people why you felt that all software should be allowed to be sold by anyone for profit. Distro CDs shipping with it, game museums having MAME cabinets set up, etc. Playing word semantics is just going to annoy people not already steeped in the FOSS world.

(for what it's worth, I also agreed to relicense my code that's inside MAME to GPLv2 for this new effort, so please don't consider me an enemy of GPL or anything.)

Why hasn't "Free as in Freedom" Software been shortened to just Freedom Software? Or Liberal or Liberty Software? This seems like a simple problem to solve honestly.

Given that this issue is still happening after decades... I think it deserves to be addressed.

That's a great question. I've always been partial to "FSF certified" and "OSI certified". Put it right on the organizations that promote the definitions. And it gets those groups extra exposure when people look the terms up. Bonus: we could then pretend FOSS stands for "FSF/OSI Sanctioned Software".

They could even get trademarks on those terms, unlike the failed attempt to trademark "open source".

> I think it deserves to be addressed.

We've gotta get people to budge on this, and see things from the other side. Find a way to do that and I think you could achieve world peace =)

Hah world peace.

I'm curious to why people thought I deserved downvoting. I think it's a reasonable question. When ever I hear "Free Software" said to the layman, it's ALWAYS followed up by "free as in freedom." Then they describe what that "freedom" means to them.

It'd be easier to have just one step of clarification than multiple.

"Libre software" attempted to bring the distinction to the English term without using English, so English speakers never really used it.

It's the L in FLOSS.

I don't understand why they thought it was a good idea to resort to a foreign word to describe freedom. It might make sense in America but not the rest of the English speaking world. I think freedom & liberty are immediately comprehensible in the context of software.

I agree, it was just as obtuse as "free" when other words would have conveyed their intent better.

Gamasutra targets game developers. And there are not many of them that would like to use license that would force them to release their source code. Such licenses (as GPL for example) may be used only for internal tools, and even then it may be a problem (GPL3). For example if you need to work with third-party outsourcing company that would hire people to do extra art for your project, and you need to give them the custom tools, if the latter are using GPL, then who knows what the third-party artists might request.

if MAME is released under MIT/BSD then it can be freely put in consoles, gameboy, psp, etc.

>and you need to give them the custom tools, if the latter are using GPL, then who knows what the third-party artists might request.

At most, source code to those custom tools which contain GPL licensed code.

>if MAME is released under MIT/BSD then it can be freely put in consoles, gameboy, psp, etc.

MAME (as a project) is now to be released under GPLv2 unless I'm missing something, but there is also a lot of BSD licensed code in MAME which can be used in proprietary projects.

That said I don't think the MAME code is of particular interest to game developers, as it's basically cpu and video/sound chip emulation coupled with drivers.

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